After having been in pain for so many years, I am convinced that pain brings many unforeseen and unacknowledged gifts with it. Most of these gifts were unwelcome at the time, but looking back, I can see the value of what I’ve learned from my experience of living with pain. Following are seven ways that pain taught me how to honor myself and thus enhance my life, even in the midst of the challenges.

1. Slowing Way Down

I had to learn to slow way, way down and move only at the speed that worked for my body, not at the speed that worked for my former life ­style.

​Pain forced me to operate in a completely different rhythm than I was used to. Life became simple, minimalist, quiet, and slow. This was a pace I normally found boring and unproductive, but slowing down taught me how to tune in to my body and its natural rhythms. I found that there is a richness to life when you slow down and take each thing as it comes.

2. Honoring the Present Path

Whether I like what is happening in the pres­ent moment or not, pain forces me to be present while I am feeling it. In that way, it is a very difficult teacher.

Pain teaches me to remember my body, to tune in to time (because it moves so slowly), and to be aware right here and now. I have learned to find the pleasant and happy things that are available right now even when pain is there, too.

3. Letting Go

Pain also taught me to let go. It forced me to finally give up the fight. It simply refused to budge until I had made an inner movement in attitude from someone who insists on making things happen to someone who gives up the need to control everything.

I learned the hard way that healing comes faster when I let go of trying to run every aspect of how my journey through pain is going to unfold. I had to learn to share the driver’s seat, in that regard.

4. Saying No

I had to learn how to say no to friends often and to the things I would have liked to participate in but couldn’t. I learned to say no to requests for my time and energy that didn’t truly honor my limitations, that would have left me feeling worse, even if the person asking was disappointed in me.

I had to learn to put my body’s needs before someone else’s need to have me be there for them. Sometimes this was difficult, but it taught me a lot about how to create healthy boundaries for myself.

5. Speaking Up for Myself

I learned to ask for help. This is not something most of us want to have to learn.

When I learned to ask openly for help from others, I also learned to acknowledge the existence of all the other people who were already affecting my life and contributing to it, even if I didn’t know them.​I also came to understand that each of us has a voice, and sometimes it takes feeling like we don’t have one, and struggling with that for a while, in order to find the courage and inner strength to finally find it and speak up. Speaking up for oneself, whether to ask for help or to communicate in other ways, is the first step in rediscovering a voice in the greater world. It’s the first step to self-empowerment and, ultimately, to full healing.

6. Being Softer with Myself and Others

When you’re fine and things are moving along in a fairly normal fashion, it’s sometimes hard to have patience with either yourself or others. We expect so much of ourselves all the time, and we also place these impossible standards on others, including our mates, siblings, and children.

Being in pain, I had to learn to take care of myself differently, to have greater gentleness toward myself and what I was going through. I also began to understand what others go through when they are dealing with illness, injury, loss, or other hardships.

Having to live with less of everything — less strength, less energy, less brainpower — taught me to be kinder to myself and kinder to others. Living with pain taught me how to give myself and others more of a break.

7. Appreciating the Little Things

I remember sitting in my house, my body burning and aching, and noticing a ball of dust in the corner of the room. I realized that, in the past, I would have gotten up and cleaned it. Right then, that action was more than my body could handle. I glanced around the room and saw all the things I wasn’t cleaning or couldn’t keep up with.

I began to appreciate how much I had taken for granted in the past. Brushing my teeth, picking up a plate of food, or driving more than ten minutes used to seem like nothing, but these were now painful and laborious.

I realized how amazing life really is and how much I looked forward to regaining any capacity for doing these things with less pain and more mobility. I remembered how I may have complained in the past about having to do something minor that now seemed like a privilege to do. It was very humbling.

Being in pain, while I would prefer not to have had to go through it, nevertheless taught me a great deal about slowing down, being more present with life as it is right now, letting go of trying to completely control how my heal­ing would unfold, how to say no when I really needed to, how to find my voice to speak up for myself and ask for help when appropriate, how to be softer and more forgiving toward myself and others, and how to be appreciative of the smallest things in life, which sometimes are the most precious.

One of the most workable metaphors I’ve found for myself for making peace with chronic pain is the metaphor of befriending and soothing a wounded animal.

What would we do if we found a wild animal shivering, scared, hurt, and bleeding in our home? Would we get angry and try to forcibly remove it? Would we leave the room, close it up tight and lock the door?Pain can seem like a dangerous beast, ready to lash out at any moment. Maybe we back away. We feel scared.

We treat it as an unwelcome invader. We want it out of our body as fast as possible. We try to find the animal control person to have it removed.

Being Present with Pain

​Yet, in the case of chronic pain, it refuses to budge. We try to ignore it, maybe metaphorically locking it in an empty room inside ourselves, but it’s still in there growling or howling or simpering all the time.

In the case of the wounded animal, we might try opening the door slowly, entering the room a little ways or justcstanding in the doorway. We would let it know we’re there and we’re not going to hurt it further. We would let it get used to our presence. We would look at it with kindness and just be with it. We might sit down so we don’t appear threatening.

The animal then begins to appear differently to us. We stop seeing only its fangs and claws and notice the caked blood and dirt on its fur and that it needs care and how frightened it is and alone. We begin to have compassion for it. We speak soothingly to it.

The Ally Beneath the Matted Fur

​We lose our concern with getting rid of it right away as we become more and more interested in helping it, and taking care of it. Instead of trying to forcefully expel it from our experience, we decide to include it.

After all, it’s already in the house.

We may move a little closer and notice its reaction. We see how it gets used to our presence, how our caring attention seems to allow it to relax a little.

Over time, it let’s us get close enough to clean its wounds and care for it. We see how it relaxes under our gentle touch. We notice that it is a beautiful animal beneath the encrusted blood and matted fur.We accept that it’s already here and won’t leave through force. We learn to treat it as if, underneath the fangs and the claws, it carries a valuable gift for our lives, something we need to know, to understand, to be with, to accept, to grow into.

As we befriend the animal, we may find a potential ally; a fox, a dog, a wild cat or a majestic bird of prey. It holds an energy and an intelligence that is available to enrich our lives.

Approaching Pain with Trust

Of course, in order to help the animal, to become its caretaker, we must change our perspective. We must move from seeing the animal as a dangerous nuisance to a potential friend and ally.

We might approach our intractable pain in much the same way, creating a relationship of trust based on respect, even if we are still a bit wary and choose to keep our distance at first.

This requires allowing the possibility of something being present there in the experience of pain that we may not have seen at first, something that might not be part of our usual experience – something wild and unkempt and lost, perhaps – but valuable nonetheless.​We slowly allow ourselves to get closer to the pain we carry, to see it with different eyes and, instead of trying to control it and kill it as the only answer, we spend time getting to know it, making peace with it, and finding out what unexpected gifts of wisdom and strength may lie within the seemingly unapproachable and frightening aspects of the wounded beast within our pain.

In the fall of 2007, I contracted Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, a collapse of the area between the collarbone and first rib. This collapse squeezes the scalene muscle, nerve ganglia, artery and veins that have to fit through this narrow space, creating severe nerve pain in the neck, arms, and hands, which affects my ability to use my hands and arms. For quite a few years, I could barely function. My life basically stopped. I lost the ability to participate in just about everything I enjoyed. I was a single mom and struggled even to be able to cook a meal for my son. After about 5 years of being very stoic and putting up with the situation, I decided that I couldn’t live my life that way any more. That’s when I started developing the approaches I write about in The Pain Companion.

How is your book different from other books on pain?The Pain Companion focuses primarily on the non-medical aspects of living with pain and pain relief. It offers companionship and solace, as well as many practical methods to reduce emotional, mental, and physical stress. Very unintentionally, books that promise a pain free result can make readers feel worse about themselves when the method doesn’t deliver on its promise. This leads to feelings of failure and shame. The Pain Companion does not require readers to end their pain, but walks along the path with them, offering simple ways to make life easier, to live with more grace, and to practice compassion toward the self while moving through and beyond the experience of pain.

The opioid crisis has led to restrictions on pain treatment, usually without offering meaningful alternatives to people living with chronic pain. How can The Pain Companion help?With the current scare about the opioid addiction crisis, many are being taken off their pain meds and left to fend for themselves in terribly difficult circumstances. While I don’t offer readers solutions from a medical standpoint and I don’t promise to make anyone pain free, what I do offer is a positive, constructive approach to living with chronic pain and relieving the incredible stress, fear, and emotional distress that comes with that. I think it’s crucial that we understand how deeply long-term pain affects every aspect of a person’s life and begin to address it not just from a physical standpoint, but from emotional, mental, and spiritual levels as well.

In your book, you recommend writing letters to your pain. Why?I recommend writing letters to pain in order to express and release our feelings about pain – the frustrations, anger, sadness, loss, guilt, and shame that we often feel when we’re living with pain. By recognizing, acknowledging, and expressing our emotional responses to pain, we can begin to let them go and find some emotional relief. Once we’ve expressed our negative feelings about pain, we’re free to consider other responses and can begin to create a more constructive relationship with it. Instead of fighting against it and resisting it as our primary response, we can begin to work with it as a messenger and an ally in healing.

Has your pain taught you anything?Pain is a difficult mentor to have, but living with it has taught me a great deal. In learning how to shift my relationship with pain, I’ve learned how to shift my relationship with my body, and, ultimately, with myself. This includes learning to be kinder, more compassionate, softer, slower, and less stressed. I understand now that pain can be a guide and is the voice of the part of us that is trying to heal. Rather than attempting to completely silence it, I have learned to listen. I have learned that the way we often go about our lives – establishing and meeting goals, trying to excel, trying to be perfect, trying to be in control – is not necessarily the best way to approach healing.

What’s next for you?I intend to continue writing and speaking with the hope of helping to shift our culture’s predominantly negative perception of pain and people in pain to one that is more constructive and healing. Pain is part of the human journey. We’re all going to meet it at some point, whether it’s physical or emotional. Living in pain is certainly a difficult and challenging experience, but one that we can learn from and move through with much more grace and well-being if we respond to it, and to ourselves, with more compassion, softness, and acceptance.

When we’re in pain and it is relentless, sooner or later we are going to get angry at someone or something.

We ask, Why me? How did this happen? Who or what is to blame for my misery? We look for the root so we can understand what happened. We think that if we can understand how it all came about, we can somehow undo it.

The trouble with this mindset is that the only way to answer these questions is to find something to blame: the job, the boss, the stresses of life, the other driver, the doctors who didn’t see it coming, air pollution, fatty foods, genetics, a traumatic childhood, our spouse, or anything else we can think of. We imagine that there is one thing, one starting point, one cause. If we can find it, we can heal.

Sometimes it is useful to pinpoint the onset of pain, such as when knowing exactly how an injury or illness happened can contribute to returning to wellness. But once that is found, it is no longer helpful to continually go over the history of an injury or ailment, the mistakes, or who was responsible for what.

You might also build up resentment against yourself for not being able to get out of the fix you are in. I It wears on you and can create a negative sense of self over time. And you will undoubtedly also feel angry at the pain at times because it is so insistent and so faceless, a force that can’t be bribed, cajoled, or bargained or reasoned with.

Anger is understandable, and it can be very healthy, but keeping it around because you need someone or something to blame, including yourself, only serves to keep pain in place. Here are some antidotes to anger and blame.

Allow Your Anger, Then Use it For Fuel

There is nothing inherently wrong with feeling angry about what happened and what you are currently suffering. In fact, for people stuck in depression and sadness, anger can be a very liberating force.

Anger has a lot of energy in it. Rather than sitting still and feeling powerless, anger wants to move and change things, so it can be a very helpful emotion when harnessed for good. It can move people out of the doldrums and into positive action.

However, once you have gotten in touch with anger, you don’t want to stay in it. It’s not helpful to continuously feel angry and blaming, even if there is something specific to fault. It simply isn’t conducive to healing.

Anger that doesn’t move turns to bitterness. Use its energy to fuel your determination to recover, rather than let it eat away at you. Let it go and you are free to move on.

Leave the Past Where It Is

If it is important to you, spend the time you need to make a clear assessment of how your illness or injury came to be, then leave it alone. If the cause is uncertain or a complete mystery, then make the choice to leave it as a mystery for the time being.

Your energy and attention need to be on healing, not on who did or didn’t do something, or what exact circumstances were at fault. With the only exception being the times you may need to be involved in legal activities or a medical review, or if the cure lies in finding the exact cause, leave the past in the past.

The energy of blame is always looking backward, and you need to marshal your resources in the present so you can heal and have a better future.

Let Go of Resentments

I think of resentment as the quieter cousin of blame. Rather than accusing and pointing the finger, resentment seems to stem from a creeping and pervasive sense of unfairness.

I noticed that I sometimes felt resentful that I was injured through my employment, but my employer was able to carry on with life as usual. I resented his freedom and normalcy, while I had to live with pain and debilitation day in and day out as a result of working for him. I felt it was somehow unfair that he carried on relatively unscathed (except for some financial ramifications).

I resented having a doctor I had never seen before spend about thirty minutes with me and write a report that strongly influenced my disability settlement. I resented the way the workers’ compensation and disability system required me to keep re-proving my injury over and over again instead of actually supporting me to heal.

Keeping these feelings around wasn’t going to get me anywhere positive. I had to learn to notice them when they arose and then decide to just let them go. In the interests of your own well-being, I would recommend letting go of resentments against anyone involved who has hindered your healing or given you bad advice or seems to be unsupportive. You just don’t have the energy to waste on blame and resentment. Instead, use your energy for healing yourself.

Hold Everyone and Everything Blameless

As a second step to releasing resentments, decide to relieve everyone and everything of their burden of blame, including yourself, even if you feel blame is deserved.

This can be challenging because many of our legal and insurance systems can be very adversarial, bent on finding out who is to blame, and we speak of pain, illness, and injury as if they are enemies to be overcome. It is easy to fall into that pattern, but it really isn’t a useful strategy for healing.

The point isn’t whether or not you’re right and justified, which may well be the case. The point is that holding on to anger, blame, and resentment simply isn’t going to get you where you want to go.

Disclaimer

Nothing on this website constitutes medical advice and is not intended to be a substitute for the medical advice of physicians. The reader should consult a physician in matters relating to his or her health and particularly with respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.